Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/28

There is no question here of plagiarism; rather, Shiki assumed that the persons reading his haiku would be familiar with Buson’s, and undoubtedly hoped that the new touches which his sensibility imposed on the old poem would be welcomed by a discriminating audience. Objectively viewed, Shiki’s haiku is as good as Buson’s, although a Western reader would condemn Shiki’s as derivative, and his first impulse might be to write a parody of his own, such as “On the temple bell, Resting, chirping, A grasshopper.” Bashō saw the danger of the virtuoso technique practised by the court poets (and by Shiki in the example I have just used), and himself seldom made direct reference to earlier works in his poetry, but he was unable to rid the literature of this characteristic feature. This is not surprising, for in a country where poetry was recognized by some as a religion it is only natural that the words and images of the old poems come as quickly to a poet’s mind as original thoughts, so that he thinks largely in other people’s terms, adding only the colouring which is his own. Similarly, one finds the same stories figuring as the basic plots of every type of Japanese theatrical entertainment. The audiences which attended a play on one of the familiar themes did not expect to be surprised by the ending nor by any major change in the plot; it was rather to the details that they looked for the differences resulting from the temperaments of successive dramatists, as in the Greek theatre the story of Oedipus, roughly the same whether treated by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, nevertheless differed significantly from dramatist to dramatist in the details, as well as in the psychological approach. In some ways the fact that the subject is prescribed enables the dramatist to display his talents in more subtle ways than in the invention of plot, which may explain why certain dramatists, notably in France, have continued to treat the story of Oedipus, and why Japanese